Baf four ’s Be ef s
The case of the missing wristwatch
“If my critics saw me walking over the Thames, they would say it was because I couldn’t swim” – Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister.
I
t was Margaret Thatcher, that Iron Lady of British politics who said: “I usually make up my mind about a man in 10 seconds, and I very rarely change it.” Well, tell her to extend it to 20 seconds – 10 seconds is too short to get the measure of any
man. I have always debated with myself the enormous power that women have over men, and yet we delude ourselves by calling them the “weaker sex”. Weaker sex indeed! Imagine a 32-year-old “immigrant” woman
from Guinea - just 32 years old, in some eyes a mere trifling, “a hotel maid” even, (and why is she being described as an “immi- grant”, who is not an “immigrant” in the USA?) bringing down with a heavy thud the whole “next president” of the Republic of France! And French presidents are supposed to be powerful men, who use their heavy weight to get what they want when they want it, one having just recently finished shooting his way about in Abidjan (so close to Guinea) and installing a man he had always wanted to be the president of Côte d’Ivoire. Imagine, a 62-year-old powerful managing director of the
powerful International Monetary Fund (IMF), the organisation that makes African countries shake in their boots, being brought low by a mere 32-year-old “immigrant” woman from Sekou Toure’s Guinea. And they say women are the “weaker sex”. Well, that reminds me of the young Ghanaian pastor in London
who keeps saying that while biblical injunctions say men are the “head” of the family, he thinks women are the “neck” of every family, and as the head cannot turn this way or that way without the neck giving it power, women are powerful people who tend to downplay the power in their hands. In that sense, women are not the weaker sex. And he is right. Because in real life, no head can turn without the neck facilitating or allowing it! In other words, the head has no power to turn this way or that way except the power given it by the neck! Which is so true; have you ever seen anybody with a stiff neck turning his head this way or that way? So, then, which is more powerful – the head or the neck? At the time of writing this, the powerful money-man from
the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), “a giant of the global financial scene” (that’s how the British daily, The Independent, describes him), had just announced his resignation as manag- ing director of the IMF. His fall from grace should remind us all of the immortal words of the African-American writer, James
8 | June 2011 New African
Arthur Baldwin, an “immigrant” of yore whose ancestors hailed from the hallowed shores of Africa: “Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did,” he once said. Can we blame the first half of Baldwin’s sentence for DSK’s
predicament? Not quite, methinks. Because, according to those who know him, he has a reputation as a “ladies’ man”. “Yes, I like women, so what?”, The Independent quotes him as having said in an interview three weeks before his fall. But, given the truth in what Baldwin said, should we not have some sympathy for the fallen “next president” of the Republic of France? Which brings me to the subject in hand: the power of the
president of the Republic of France. In early May, the former South African president, Thabo Mbeki, one of the intellectual giants of our times, wrote a piece for the American magazine, Foreign Policy, on what France and the United Nations had just done in Côte d’Ivoire, in which he posed some very important questions that bear heavily on Africa’s place in the world (see pages 34-38 of this issue for Mbeki’s full article). I had said pretty much the same in this very column two
weeks before Mbeki’s article (see “Beefs”, May 2011), but, as Mrs Thatcher again said: “If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.” So, let’s spare a few moments and ponder what Mbeki said – he is an ex-president and a longstanding African Union envoy to Côte d’Ivoire, so his words must, and do, carry weight! First, Mbeki asked, alarmingly: “Why is the UN entrench-
ing former colonial powers on our continent?” He did not wait for an answer, but went on: “The international community has assiduously suppressed proper appreciation of various explosive allegations [in Côte d’Ivoire] which, rightly or wrongly, have informed and will continue to inform the views of the Gbagbo- supporting population in southern Côte d’Ivoire – and much of Francophone Africa!” Being the man who presided over many of the Ivorian nego-
tiations of the past decade, Mbeki is perfectly qualified to say: “In protracted negotiations from 2002, the Ivorians agreed that the presidential elections would not be held until various conditions had been met... [And] despite the fact that none of this was honoured, the presidential elections were allowed to
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